First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (11 page)

Until it became easier to buy in supermarkets all over the world, Greeks also traveled with feta cheese. Often, they did not realize how much they would miss this damp white cheese until they were away from
home, at which point they became desperate for another salty taste of it. In the words of a Greek academic who got a job at a university in Wales, and who once traveled back from Greece with a vast ten-kilo tin of feta cheese: “I would cut a piece with my meal every night. It was like ‘white gold’ to me.”

One of the functions of traditional cuisines is to reinforce these shared childhood food memories. Food anthropologist David Sutton found that there was a conscious element of remembering in many of the feasts held on the island of Kalymnos in the Aegean. Kalymnians use big ritualized meals as a way of planning to remember events in the future. There is nothing accidental about this remembering. When roast lamb is shared for Easter, it anchors all of those who are eating it in a particular place and time. During a meal, Sutton found that his Kalymnian friends would often say to him, “Eat, in order to remember Kalymnos.”

These group food memories are a big part of the immigrant experience. As the Italian American John F. Carafoli has said, “people start worrying about food and memory when they realize that the food they’ve loved might not be around forever.” Those arriving in America from elsewhere had an urgent need to buy Arborio rice and plum tomatoes, or garam masala and lime pickle, as the case might be. To eat these foods again in the new country was a way of holding on to the grandmothers and mothers who had first cooked and served them. Often, however, the remembering through food is bittersweet, because even when you have tracked down every last herb and spice, the missing ingredient is the cook. You find you don’t want pasta “just like mama used to make”; you actually want mama herself. After her Hungarian grandparents died, novelist Charlotte Mendelson found herself desperately missing the food her grandmother used to cook for her and her sister: pancakes filled with cream cheese and lemon rind, chicken paprikás, and especially, “her meatloaf and stuffed cabbage.” Mendelson realized it would be possible, in theory, to find an authentic Hungarian recipe for meatloaf and cabbage, and attempt to re-create her grandmother’s dishes, but this wasn’t the point. “The internet is no help; I need her.”

At a certain point as a child, we notice that food at home is not the same as the dinners our friends eat. You discover that some houses smell of burned onions and some smell of spice, while others, disconcertingly, have
no smell at all. Even when the same repertoire of meals are served, they are never actually identical to yours. One of my strongest memories—of food, of anything—is being invited to a friend’s house when I was about eight. “I hope you like macaroni cheese,” her mother said, and I nodded, enthusiastically. This was one of our favorite suppers at home. But oh, the disappointment when it arrived. Technically, this was the same dish that we ate: the same elbow-shaped pasta, béchamel sauce, and cheddar cheese, baked in the oven until bubbling. Yet everything about it was off. It looked too yellow, it tasted too strong, and it smelled of feet—our mother’s macaroni cheese was mild and milky. It was like one of those nightmares where your parents are replaced with imposters. This was not the “macaroni cheese” I knew. It would have been less disturbing if the friend’s mother had introduced it to me as some completely different dish rather than passing it off as “macaroni cheese.”

Given that we all bring such different food memories to the
table, how is it ever possible to cook a meal that will please everyone? Chefs are constantly battling with this question of personal memory and how it affects the pleasure we take from a meal. This is where home cooks have an advantage, because we know how different people around the table will react to various foods. We remember the person in the family who will burst into tears if we serve them fish, and the one who had a bad reaction once to a moldy raspberry. But chefs are cooking blind, for strangers whose memories are unknown. The modernist chef Heston Blumenthal once told me that in his dream scenario, he would conduct a long interview with every customer at his restaurant The Fat Duck, examining each person’s deepest food memories—good and bad—before the customer sat down to eat. Only then would he decide what to cook.

Blumenthal himself discovered how radically childhood memories can affect the perception of food when he got talking to a friend about tonka beans. These “black wrinkled beans” are one of Blumenthal’s favorite ingredients. To him, the flavor of tonka is somewhere between vanilla, cloves, and “cut hay.” But he had an additional reason to love tonka beans, which was that the smell reminded him of rubbery flip-
flops, and therefore triggered “lovely memories of holidays in Cornwall.” Blumenthal was disconcerted to find that when he served his tonka-bean sauce to a friend, she hated it, but couldn’t explain why. And then it dawned on her: “She’d had several hefty operations as a child and, she suddenly realised, the bean’s rubber aroma reminded her of the mask used to administer the anaesthetic.”

These are the sort of fluke memories no cook could be expected to take account of. But what of more culturally determined differences in food memory? Dr. Paul Breslin, a colleague of Mennella and Beauchamp’s at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, did an experiment to test the threshold at which people could detect the smell of benzaldehyde, the chemical that gives bitter almond essence its distinctive marzipan smell. This is also the compound that gives cherries and plums much of their flavor. Breslin asked a panel of ten trained tasters to smell different concentrations of benzaldehyde in the air until he found the lowest threshold at which everyone could detect it. He found that nine out of the ten subjects could detect very weak concentrations of benzaldehyde only when they simultaneously drank sugar solution. The sweetness together with the smell reminded them of sweet cherries or plums. The tenth person on the panel happened to be from Japan and responded rather differently. That panelist was the only one who could detect very low levels of benzaldehyde when it was paired with MSG rather than sugar. It must have triggered memories of umeboshi plums, the salted plums that are eaten with rice in Japan. To the Western tasters, the concept of savory plums did not exist, and therefore they did not register it, whereas the Japanese panelist was imprinted with the knowledge of savory plums from a young age.

How can you find common ground between those who think plums are savory and those who think they are sweet? Chef Daniel Patterson, the proprietor of Coi restaurant in California (named one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2014), is intensely preoccupied by such questions. He views all food as a form of memory and sees part of his job as being “expectation fulfilment” while at the same time creating something new. In his book
Coi: Stories and Recipes
, Patterson says he aims at cooking dishes “with an open, wide-eyed quality, almost child-like in spirit, the way I remember the
summers of my youth.” He recognizes, however, that this is a hard task. Patterson knows that when customers from different countries taste the same cucumber, they will all in effect be responding to different things. “The way an American, a Dane and a Russian understand the taste and context of a cucumber, for example, can be wildly different.” Patterson’s job, as he sees it, is to “make food that somehow triggers primal memories in all of them, using shared experience to create something new.”

He tries to do this by finding a point of “familiarity.” When diners arrive at Coi, Patterson offers them “chips and a dip”—in fact, a fancy version of brown rice crackers with an avocado dip—to make them feel welcomed by something they already know. When he serves an ingredient that many diners will not have encountered before and might find alienating, such as ducks’ tongues, he will pair them with the recognizable crunch of a friendly green salad.

In Patterson’s opinion, “all food is about memory,” but perhaps never more so than at the dessert course. His favorite dessert that he has ever created at Coi is lime marshmallow with coal-toasted meringue. It consists of homemade ginger marshmallow, blended with lime and frozen in a “Pacojet beaker” overnight before being topped with meringue and burned with charcoal held with tweezers. The reason he thinks it works so well is that it unleashes “shared experiences full of emotion”: “It’s a childhood memory dish for grown-up palates.” The memory this dish is triggering is the one—universal in American childhoods—of sitting around a campfire toasting marshmallows on sticks. “I’m not going to re-create a Twinkie,” says Patterson. “But toasted marshmallows are a cultural experience that Americans share. You go to an uncivilized place, you put a marshmallow on a stick.”

It is ironic that a talented chef such as Daniel Patterson should need to go to such inordinate lengths—the Pacojet, the tweezers, the charcoal, the sharpness of ginger and lime—to replicate the simple memory of sitting by a fire with friends, opening a factory-made packet of marshmallows. But eating is like that. In an age when most of us are, to a greater or lesser extent, reared on packaged foods, few handmade desserts can equal the emotional potency of a bag of drugstore marshmallows. Patterson needs to find a way of giving you drugstore memories in a restaurant setting. It is
not easy. The elaboration involved in Patterson’s frozen lime marshmallow shows that recapturing a memory is much harder than capturing it in the first place.

People go on about the first moment that Proust’s hero dipped his madeleine in the tea and was transported to childhood. But we hardly ever talk about what happened next:

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret.

Whatever was there in the first sip, it’s gone by the third. “The potion is losing its magic.” The surge of memory is short-lived. Scientists call this “desensitization.” When you try to get back to the past through food, so often you find you can’t, because either the food has changed or you have. This is one of the many things that makes packaged foods so alluring. With their bright labels and never-changing fonts, they seem to offer a continuity with the past that you just can’t get from other foods. The easiest way to get the drugstore hit is to keep going back to the drugstore.

“I bite into my Hostess snowball, and retreat to a world where
the only worry is what to ask your mother to put in your lunch box the next day or which pieces of candy you will select at the Kwik-Pak on your way home from school.” Jill McCorkle’s vivid description from her 1998 story “Her Chee-To Heart” captures the nostalgia many of us feel for various processed foods. During the ups and downs of growing up, they kept us company. No matter what horrors or boredom the schoolday held, reading the breakfast-cereal box was a daily thrill, and its contents could be relied upon always to taste the same. The names of packaged foods were dreamed up by marketeers with our childish pleasure in mind, and formulated to give a kid’s sweet tooth a buzz. And when we grow up,
we repay the food companies with a loyalty that looks something like filial devotion. When Hostess Twinkies ceased production in November 2012, there was mourning in the United States for this highly processed “Golden Sponge Cake with a Creamy Filling.” Though it was composed of shortening, corn syrup, colorings, and other unwholesome ingredients, with a shelflife so long it became the punch line of jokes, for many the Twinkie was the taste of childhood. It was Proust’s madeleine for the junk-food generation.

When you get three or more adults with nothing in common together, surprisingly often, the conversation will turn to the junk foods we knew and loved as children. There is a communal comfort to be had in reciting the names out loud, together, like a liturgy. In Britain, the catechism of nostalgia includes such sweets as Spangles, Jelly Tots, Rolos, Fry’s Chocolate Creams, Space Dust. These are common reference points that take us back to some joyous prepubertal age when life was free and easy.

No home-cooked food, no matter how delicious, can match the power of bringing people together in misty-eyed recollection of industrially produced food. Convenience foods have been blamed for the breakdown of communal eating. Where families once shared a single dish from a single pot, now they often eat according to individual whim without sharing the experience: multiple microwaveable meals to cater for the taste of each family member, or individually wrapped sandwiches and hamburgers. But the experience of junk food is still shared—in the memory, where its emotional force can be alarmingly strong. Unlike traditional foods, which are remembered jointly within families or communities, mass-produced foods and drinks are remembered across continents. How often do you meet someone who hasn’t tasted Coca-Cola, at least once? I have no idea what your mother’s cooking tasted like, or whether I would have enjoyed her macaroni cheese. But if you tell me she gave you a Mars bar for a treat every Saturday, I’d instantly be able to share your memory. I’d be recollecting the soft squidge of the nougat and the way the layer of chocolate sometimes splintered as I bit into it. Candy-bar nostalgia puts us all on the same page.

The power of convenience foods to insinuate themselves into some of our most precious memories—of family, of happiness, of child
hood—
should be a pressing concern for everyone who is serious about improving anyone’s diet, including their own. From babyhood onward—and maybe before, if your mother ate a bad diet during pregnancy—we are imprinted with memories of junk, like Algerians programmed with memories of mint tea. Our olfactory bulbs have gathered endless sense patterns of foods high in sugar, fat, and salt. These flavor memories have become part of the fabric of our sense of self and are not easily discarded, because the system, as we have seen, is designed “not to forget.” Even when the convenience food no longer tastes good, we still return to it like a homecoming, or like mice pressing the lever to get more pellets, because we remember what the thrill of the dopamine response once felt like.